Basically, we know that a third of the potential buyers we meet will never buy from us, another third will buy, but not right now and the remaining third are ready to go, if they can be convinced to take action right now. The issue though is when we meet them for the first time, we don’t know which bucket they fit into and we can waste a lot of time and energy thrashing around before we work it out. The knowledge gain process is not straightforward and there are a lot of traps and feints ahead of us, as we make our way forward into the impenetrable jungle. Is there a faster way? Perhaps if we can plumb the depths of our experience and identify some buying or non-buying signals this will help us speed things up.

Being salespeople, buying signals are difficult for us because we don’t take “no” for an answer. We will push for the meeting even in the face of resistance. Our sales exploits have informed us that the buyer who assures us he has absolutely no more than fifteen minutes to meet with us, will spend ninety minutes talking to us if we have what they need. We also know that “no” isn’t a permanent feature and things can change, so we never give up hope. It also means we go up a lot of dead ends and have to extract ourselves for the waste of time, black, smelly, squelchy bog we have become trapped in.

Let’s look at some loser situations we will encounter, when meeting potential buyers, as warnings to weight up the investment of our valuable time with them. I had a great lunch with the ebullient foreign President of this firm, which had been bought by a very large Japanese enterprise a few years earlier. He was excited about bringing our training into the firm to strengthen the sales team and to deliver the sales numbers the headquarters wanted. His Japanese CFO had been sent in from the mothership. That snippet of information should have sounded a warning bell for me. The lunch went well, he was excited and I was excited to get things going, so I ignored that deadly little trip wire.

That ebullience I should have realised was built on a foundation of sand within his own organisation and that the Japanese CFO actually pulled the strings not him. The lesson here is that when you know the firm has been purchased by a larger entity, or is a joint venture of some type, definitely check who has come across from the mothership and what positions they hold.

Look at the President you are talking to through that lens and ask some subtle but important questions about how decisions are made. What I should have done was to ask about how he was going to get the people to whom he reported to okay the purchase of the training I was proposing and then settle back and very carefully analyse his answer. I needed to strip his ego and bold front out of the equation and take a good look behind the velvet curtain to try and get a sense of who had the real power.

In the end, despite our conviviality at lunch, he just kept peppering my follow-up attempts with a string of excuses and stalls. The penny dropped eventually and I realised this deal was never going to happen, because he couldn’t convince his CFO to okay the expenditure. His ego can’t allow him to admit to me that he has little or no power within his own organisation, despite have the grand title “President” on his business card.

Another President who I have been chasing after for a long time now, tells me he wants our training, but my follow-up emails and calls never get a response. When I collar him at an event, we are both attending, he pleads he is so busy with this or that and so couldn’t get back to me, but he is still interested. Here it the conundrum. Yes, he is interested, but can he translate that interest into a deal with his firm? I know his industry is in turmoil and although the technical changes don’t directly affect his business, the overall industry direction does.

The chances of a deal happening seem slim, but the price of a regular follow-up email is not high. However, I shouldn’t invest any emotional energy into him whatsoever because only pain is in that future. What I don’t want though is he eventually gets religion about doing the training and wanders off with a competitor, because they were the last contact he had from a provider. That would really hurt if that happened. Things can change rapidly in business, but we just don’t know enough about the buyer’s internal situation to know when. Can you imagine if I finally corner him at some future event and he says, “Oh yeah, we did the training with XYZ company”. Would that be grounds for justifiable homicide?

The denizens of the upper floor, quiet, luxurious C-suites with expensive wall hangings and deep pile carpets, determine the changes the organisation needs to make to survive or to do even better. They expect everyone below to get behind their dispositions. Deep down in the engine room of the sales team, these changes are communicated by their boss. Usually, sales leaders become the boss because they lasted through two consecutive recessions and were the last one left standing or they were the star producer and were kicked up to management, many years ago.

Invariably, they received no leadership training on the way through, so they are constantly making it up, using trial and error as they go along. They may just bluntly tell everyone how it is and expect the salespeople will snap into line and obey the new direction.

Sales is an emotional rollercoaster of constant rejection, with hard sales targets and permanent instability. Somewhere in that firefight, the salespeople have carved out their own little world and cobbled together a construct, held together with string and adhesive tape, which allows them to survive or possibly thrive. Then the big bosses turn up and tear a hole in that neat little safe and sound world. Suddenly, the salespeople have to make changes to what has always worked and their sales leader is no help. What happens to their motivation?

Salespeople are already world class, gold medal winning whiners. It is always someone else’s fault as to why they can’t make their targets. The system requiring them to make this latest change has just handed out the ultimate all-weather, all season excuse for missing the numbers. Finding the path of least resistance is how most people operate and salespeople in particular, because they are permanently time poor. They cut corners and shave off service quality to ensure maximum speed.

Change means slowing everything down and recalibrating what needs to be done. These changes will often impact their clients and particularly in Japan, salespeople hate having to bring any changes to their buyers, which will affect their operations. How can salespeople adjust to change?

Decision One is whether to continue with this company or not? In Japan, there is a dearth of salespeople, so job mobility is at world recording breaking highs. Taking your clients and moving is super easy today, so their response to the changes is “goodbye big bosses, I am leaving with all my business cards, to work for the opposition”.

What about for those who choose to stay? First order of duty is to not rely on the boss for how to make the adjustment. Expect they won’t be much chop when it comes to this type of thing, as they are totally untrained for it. Salespeople have to work it out for themselves. Once that reality is accepted and the change is confronted directly, then some analysis is needed.

In any change, there are pluses and minuses and salespeople must run the ruler over where these are located. Are there any advantages to the buyers with these changes? If this is the case, then that is always going to be a great conversation and one the salesperson can look forward to initiating.

More likely, how can the negatives of these changes be minimised for the buyers? Ultimately, the salespeople have to be agnostic about what they think about the changes and be fully focused on what they mean for their clients. If the changes are a pain for the client, what can they do the reduce the amount of pain or what can they do to counterbalance the pain?

Maybe they can’t do anything and they consequently lose that client. Well salespeople lose clients all the time, so there in nothing unique in that. They also know how to find new clients, so they have to get busy with that activity and find clients for whom the changes are not an impediment to doing deals.

Salespeople have to be resilient or they cannot survive in the rough and tumble of the sales life, so adjusting to the new is built into their DNA. They won’t necessarily welcome or like the changes, but they can make them work because they are experts in adaption.